This is the battle-cry of the class-conscious American
workers. They say: We have only one political question be fore us, and that
is the question of the workers’ earnings and their working day.

To Russian workers it may at first sight seem very strange and puzzling
to have all social and political questions reduced to a single one. But in
the United States of America, the most advanced country in the world, which
has almost complete political liberty, where democratic institutions are
most developed, and where tremendous progress has been made in labour
productivity, it is quite natural that the question of socialism should
come to the fore.

Thanks to the existence of complete political liberty, it is possible
in America, better than in any other country, to calculate the total
production of wealth and draw up a statistical report of production. That
calculation, based on reliable data, shows that in America there are, in
round numbers, 15,000,000 working-class families.

Together, these working-class families annually produce consumers’
goods to the value of sixty thousand million rubles. This works out at
4,000 rubles a year per working-class family.

But at present, under the capitalist social system, only half this vast
amount of wealth, only thirty thousand millions, goes to the workers, who
constitute nine-tenths of the population. The other half is pocketed by the
capitalists, who, with all their apologists and hangers-on, constitute only
one-tenth of the population.

In America, as in other countries, unemployment is rife and the cost of
living is steadily rising. Want among the workers is becoming more and more
distressful and intolerable. American statistics show that about
half the workers are working part time. And what an immense
amount of social labour is still being wasted owing to the preservation of
senseless, backward and scattered small production, particularly in
agriculture and in commerce!

Thanks to complete political liberty and the absence of feudal
landlords in America, machinery is employed there on a wider scale than
anywhere else in the world. The aggregate power of the machines employed in
the manufacturing industry alone amounts to eighteen million steam
h.p. At the same time, an investigation of all power resources in the form
of waterfalls showed? according to the report of March 14, 1912, that by
converting the power of waterfalls into electricity America could
immediately obtain an additional sixty million h.p.!

Already a land of boundless wealth, it can at one stroke
treble its wealth, treble the productivity of its social
labour, and thereby guarantee to all working-class families a
decent standard of living worthy of intelligent human beings, and a not
excessively long working day of six hours.

But owing to the capitalist social system we see in most of the big
cities of America—and in the rural districts too for that
matter—appalling unemployment and poverty, a wanton waste of human labour
side by side with the unprecedented luxury of the multimillionaires, of the
rich, whose fortunes run into thousands of millions.

The American working class is rapidly becoming enlightened, and is
organising in a powerful proletarian party. Sympathy for this party is
growing among all the working people. Working with the aid of first-class
machines, and seeing at every turn marvels of engineering and the
magnificent successes of labour resulting from the organisation of
large-scale production, the wage-slaves of America are beginning clearly to
realise what their tasks are, and are advancing the plain, obvious and
immediate demands for an income of four thousand rubles a year for every
working-class family, and a six-hour day.

The aim of the American workers is quite attainable in any civilised
country in the world; but to achieve it, the country must enjoy the
fundamental conditions of freedom....

And there is no road to a free future other than by way of an
independent working-class organisation, educational, industrial,
co-operative and political.